Kandasamy

Director: Susi Ganesan
Cast: Vikram, Shriya

Apart from good screenplay- a super hero movie needs a great build-up for the hero entry and then slowly with the power of deception, terrorize the enemy and bring a smile in our face which should widen as the hero displays his master stroke of appearance; a stylish movie demands great camera angles with rich colour tones, glamorous heroine dancing her way into our heart, exotic locations, a stud who is the epitome of trend; a Robin Hood movie should offer a clever and cunning hero with a completely contrast alias, a moving circumstance to be an outlaw, an intelligent officer to nail him down and finally a social message; a masala movie need a heroine exposing every time she appears on screen, an item number, few lines praising the hero, gravity defying fights, cantankerous comedy track and sentimental scenes.

I guess Susi started off with a Robinhood script, digressed into other subjects and concocted a dish with the weakest ingredients from them all in poor ratio, making this movie to not even become a collection of well executed set-pieces. Hence, what we see on screen is a drama troupe, whose members become big officers and stage a poorly executed incarnation drama to bring back Indian money locked abroad to use them for adopting villages, with their super cool (wannabe) (fe)male protagonist depicting himself as a multi-millionaire(but only a CBI officer) in day and a cock at night which sings while fighting crime, all because there is a far-fetched relation between his friend’s hand being cut and poverty; all in the name of God.

In the name of sleekness, Susi shuttles with different tones for filming, changes the hero’s dress from casuals to blazer before his execution, ultra-modernizes CBI and never let important scenes to linger in our minds in the name of fast paced editing.

One feels bad for Vikram, the only good the film offers. Every time he gives a menacing smile we feel his cry to save the film.

Verdict: 1/5 Stars

Kaminey

Director: Vishal Baradwaj

This dedication to yore with its engaging as well as tiring allusion to the yesteryear is a winner from the start.

The story is about two brothers who want to step out of their bourgeois life and accrete into the riches in their own contrasting way. Circumstances change their future one rainy night, which leads into a bloody battle of smuggling, gang-war and maharastrian language politics. Shahid plays the twins who are a mixture of callowness and callus in different ratios with their own speech problems, in his carrier best performance in this dark comedy-action drama. Having taken a typical bollywood masala plot, Vishal fills the screenplay with an overdose of cinematic depiction allover – be it the Charlie’s dream or him running like a horse race. He also employs witty conversations which takes a toil on so many topics which sometimes get overly multi layered that it becomes esoteric for the people who comes in for entertainment from this enormously packed 2 hour film.

Every character has been given a sub-plot all concatenated in this straight forward screenplay which itself is a great leap from the mainstream cinema. These characters also have different dialects and sometimes languages for them and priyanka excels here.

Vishal has extracted the best from his artist and technicians alike. Gulzar’s words enchant us and take us back to the 70s when it needs to with apt tunes by VIshal and effective background score which rings tan de tan in our ears, while the cinematography captures the vision of the director with artistic style with good aid from the editing department.

Even with its quibbles Kaminey stands out from the rest for its originality as well as inspired usage of screenplay techniques making it a class apart, opening up a next genre for classy masala films.